Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet final beta was released today, bringing quite a few changes, like locally integrated menus (LIM) by default, upstart was replaced with systemd by default as well as various other improvements and fixes. Let's take a look at what's new!

Changes in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet final beta

Locally integrated menus are displayed in the window's titlebar for unmaximized windows, instead of the previous default Unity approach, which was to always display the menu on the top panel. LIM was introduced with Ubuntu 14.04 as an alternative to Unity's Appmenu (global menu), but it's not used by default in either Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10.

LIM uses autohide by default however, there are some new options which allow you to change its behavior. Most importantly, you can now disable the autohide feature for both LIM as well as the previously used default Unity global menu. This option is available via Dconf Editor: com > canonical > unity and enabling "always show menus".

Furthermore, LIM was tweaked and it now allows accessing the menus of unfocused windows, a feature that wasn't avaialble until now. Thanks to this, you can directly open the menu of an unfocused window by clicking on it. If you don't like this behavior, you can disable it via Dconf Editor: com > canonical > unity > integrated-menus > unfocused-windows-popup.

If you prefer the old default global menu (Appmenu), you can easily switch back to it, by going to System Settings > Appearance and on the Behavior tab, under "Show the menus for a window", enable "In the menu bar".

Yet another menu improvement in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet is the addition of JAyatana by default - this provides AppMenu support for Java Swing applications:

Other Unity and Compiz changes include:

Dash, HUD and the logout dialogs now work over fullscreen windows;

tweaks to animations for faster startup and shutdown experiences;

fixes for various problems that occur with the nVidia proprietary driver (mostly blank or black windows);

many bug fixes and small improvements.

Another change, not visual but a very important one nevertheless, is that Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet switched to booting with systemd by default, replacing upstart. This change affects Ubuntu desktop along with all Ubuntu desktop flavors as well as cloud/autopkgtests (snappy was already using systemd).

This change occurred on March 9 and back then, Martin Pitt said that the plan is to use systemd for a few weeks and if "there are too many or too big regressions", Vivid will be reverted to boot with upstart by default. So the final Ubuntu 15.04 release will most probably boot with systemd by default, but there's still a (minor) chance it won't.

I'm using Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet for a couple of weeks and I didn't encounter any issues with systemd, though some users have reported issues with it, like a very long boot time, but hopefully everything will be fixed for the final release. What I can tell you from my test is that my laptop not only boots just as fast with systemd as it did with upstart, but the shutdown process is now very fast - around 2-3 seconds, while before this change, it sometimes took more than 8-9-10 seconds.

And finally, Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet final beta ships with various theme improvements, like support for GTK 3.14, better CSD apps integration (though THIS bug still occurs) and more:

Here are screenshots with a few of the core GNOME apps that were updated to version 3.14 in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet:

Under the hood, Vivid final beta ships with Mesa 10.5.0, Xorg server 1.17.1 and the Ubuntu Linux Kernel 3.19.0, based on the upstream 3.19.2 Linux Kernel.

Vivid final beta ships with GTK 3.14.9 and not the latest 3.16 (and mostly GNOME 3.14 apps as you can see from the list above) because GNOME 3.16 was just released and Ubuntu 15.04 had its feature freeze on February 19th. However, at least some important applications were updated to version 3.14, like Nautilus (Ubuntu 14.10 has Nautilus 3.10), GNOME Terminal (Utopic has an ancient version: 3.6.2) and Totem (Utopic has version 3.10.1).

Also, GNOME Shell 3.14.4 is available in the repositories (and available by default in Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 Vivid Vervet final beta, obviously), along with the 3.14 version of GNOME Control Center, GNOME Settings Daemon, GDM and most GNOME apps like Maps, Weather, Clocks, Bijiben, Music, Photos, Boxes as well as GNOME games like Mines and Sudoku.

Download Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet final beta

Before downloading it, remember that Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet is in beta, so you may encounter issues, especially with the recent switch to boot with systemd!